You Don't Mess Around With Jane

Jane Austen’s First Law of Blogging

"I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Blog under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first post."

Tracy Chevalier's new book includes Austen references

Elizabeth accepts her fate, albeit with a heavy heart – “I’m not the sort of lady a man chooses to marry, for I am too plain and too serious” – while her ever-hopeful sister Margaret holds on to the romantic dream. The person responsible for this giddy delusion, Elizabeth suggests (as does Chevalier), is Jane Austen, a contemporary whose fiction of love and marriage is charged with leading women like Margaret astray. The stories of these two spinsters, says Chevalier, need to be told, to redress the rose-tinted vision of 19th-century amours created by Austen, who herself lived a spinster’s life, yet wrote stories that espoused the opposite ideals. “We are so steeped in Jane Austen. This story is, in a way, about her not only physically but in spirit. She never married and died when she was 41. I was looking for women who don’t end up married.

“It was a sad thing but there was a freedom in their spinsterhood. I’m suggesting that for some women at the time, if they didn’t marry, there was another life of intellectual pursuit, as well as their female friends, their sisters – Austen was very close to her sister, Cassandra. This is a novel that addresses questions of independence and being alone. In a way, Austen sidesteps these issues,” claims Chevalier.